One of the best things you can do to make your life significantly better is to figure out how long it would take you to get a job that you could survive with, then save enough many in the bank to be able to live that long without trouble.
Sure, which is easy for us (here on HN) as we possess skills that are sought after. But even you have to realize that most people aren't in the same situation, nor in situations where they can just sit down and learn stuff like that. In addition, being poor tends to make you more poor, as everything is working against you. But it might be hard to sympathize with that reality unless you've experienced it yourself at one point in your life.
Life is wide, really really wide, and it's a shitty experience for large swaths of the population.
